ant

On Monday I blogged about why I love Digg and all the unique and cool elements of this site. However there are certain things on Digg that annoy everyone including the almighty CEO Kevin Rose. While I love Digg I thought this would be a great opportunity to mention what I don’t like.

Spam

Everyone knows that spam completely sucks but its existence on Digg varies to being very subtle or extremely overt. Firstly you have the spammers that mass create new accounts to digg up a story to get it to the front page. The story that was dugg up by the spammers may be innocent or it could be trying to make increased revenue from ad sales. Either way it sucks and Digg needs to try and get rid of this.

Classic Digg Spammer

Also you have the subtle spammers. These are the people that find an ‘upcoming’ story that is slightly related to their site and comment on it with a link back to their own site. Once the story gets hundreds or thousands of diggs, heaps of people visit the link back. While this is not overt spam it is still assholes that are doing this for their own personal gain.

Douche bags

This basically sums up why Digg pisses me off sometimes. They exist as spammers, ‘power users’ etc. Firstly you have the idiots who comment totally inappropriately on sensitive stories such as a death. While Digg is a place that encourages freedom of speech you don’t have to always be a blatant asshole. Thankfully Digg has a ‘bury this’ option as a way of telling those douche bags to STFU.

Adding to this you have the idiots that decide to comment on every single story with ridiculous facts, accusations and more. However once again the ‘bury this’ option is there.

Now I talk about the real douchebags…

‘Power Users’

SEOmoz says that:

“When folks think of Digg, they’re often misled into believing that the content seen on the homepage is representative of what a wide base of Internet users think is news-worthy and important. The numbers tell a different story – that of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users.”

This guy has the facts straight. Regular users like you and me who submit great content have less than 10 diggs while a so called ‘power user’ who submits the story a few hours later with the exact same title will have hundreds or thousands of diggs.

This is a great explanation of the problems we face because of these assholes.

Failure to Attribute

This is again what pisses me off on Digg. Most of the stuff you see on the front page is quality content written or designed by talented authors. The least one could do to attribute would be to link to the authors work.

However common ‘power users’ often link the image/video/text to their own website and therefore gain ad revenue from increased traffic. It’s really not that hard not to attribute.

Overkill of Memes

Less important but still annoying. Memes are great and everyone loves them but due to the nature of Digg; common memes are repeated so often that they are killed. While somes memes such as the infamous pedobear get hundreds of diggs, others like ‘Dear Oatmeal..’ and ‘??? Profit!’ get to the point where they are so lame it is hardly funny.

These guys again fall into the douche bag category.

Bonus: Digg Bar

This feature has since died but I still think it was important enough to include in this post. Kevin Rose explains why the Digg Bar was killed.

What other flaws exist in Digg and what can they do to fix these current ones?

I love RSS, the ability to gather all the information and news into one application is phenomenal for me. RSS readers (the application that lets you read all this content), come in many different shapes and forms. I went with Google Reader, a web based RSS reader that would let me read my feeds from any computer with an internet connection. This is very useful for me as I am normally on more than one computer during the day. However some people prefer a desktop application, it’s a personal preference.

Google Reader has some awesome feature like beautiful and very fast interface. However it is missing a pretty important feature:  password protected feeds support. Examples of feeds that are password protected are your Gmail inbox or your Twitter feed.

The secret to get password protect feeds into Google Reader is a third party application called Feedburner. Warning – Your feed is most probably password protected for a good reason, by parsing it through Feedburner it takes the secure layer off it and is potentially viewed by anyone.

First

Find the password protected feed you want to import into Google Reader. I’ll Use my Twitter RSS feed. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss

Second

Take the Feed URL and burn it into Feedburner, you can sign up here. Feedburner will tell you that it is not possible to burn the feed as it is password protected but it does tell you how to correct the feed and let it parse.

The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like http://user:password@www.website.com/index.xml.

So what you would do is stick your username and password in the specific part of the feed URL. http://user:password@www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss. You should then burn your feed into Feedburner.

Third

You should now have your Feedburner feed. Now all you have to do is add that feed to Google Reader. Now everything should work! Remember that you should not give that feed URL to anybody as it is of your confedential account.

That should do it! Any better ideas? Comment!

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